Most industrial processes and systems usually contain alarm systems in which measured signals are monitored. Such industrial processes and systems can include, for example, conventional and nuclear power plants, pulp and paper plants, petroleum refineries, chemical and bio-chemical plants, and so forth. Examples of other industrial processes or systems include, for example, aerospace facilities, aircraft cockpits, medical intensive care units, and various government and military command locations. In these type of processes or systems, a large number of automated alarms are typically utilized, which are established to monitor a measured value, and to activate a warning signal if the value goes beyond an interval with a lower and an upper limit.
In process control environments, for example, operators frequently identify problems by monitoring an alarm summary screen. In large processes, it is a very complex task for the operators to obtain an overview of the failure situation since even a small fault may cause the supervision system to trigger several hundred alarms during a short interval. This stressful situation may cause the plant operators to make serious mistakes because they may be unable to sort out which alarms are important and which alarms that are not. Even a single fault may give rise to a complex alarm situation since the fault may have consequences that trigger other alarms. If, for example, a single alarm is utilized with several consequential faults, it is not a straightforward task for the operator to identify the root cause.
In general, an alarm summary screen is a text-based list of alarms. Several problems exist with this method of presentation. The operator must decipher a great deal of information by interpreting alarm data line by line. This is a time-consuming process and is not an optimal method for identifying a problem when time is critical. The number of visible alarms is limited to the size of the active display. That is, oftentimes, in an alarm flood, alarms are pushed off the screen and are no longer visible. Operators are required to scroll to find pertinent alarms and often will miss the alarm they are looking for. In fact, in the case of an alarm flood, this screen is often unmanageable and is considered an impediment to the problem.
A traditional alarm summary screen does not facilitate root cause analysis. When an alarm appears, operators are trained to look to their schematics to define the root cause. Thus, the traditional alarm summary provides only a notification that a problem has occurred and where it exists. Such alarm screens offer very little in terms of assisting the operator to define the initial cause of the problem, the consequences of the problem, and providing potential solutions.
In an effort to address the foregoing difficulties, it is believed that the use of a graphically implemented alarm map as discussed in greater detail herein can be implemented to address many of the problems with traditional alarm summary screens.